


Rubicon

by blue_sun



Series: Twice A Year [2]
Category: Twilight Series - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angela bear-maces a vampire, Concussions, Gen, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-01
Updated: 2015-05-01
Packaged: 2018-03-26 15:41:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3856081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blue_sun/pseuds/blue_sun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jacob calls it the Danube, sitting in a kitchen in borrowed clothes with his eyes still red from being maced, but Angela doesn't think that's what he means. What he means is, there are things he shouldn't tell her and the decision to do it anyway would have consequences that spread wreckage across decades.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rubicon

**Author's Note:**

> Alternate continuity to 'The Season For It', from what happens after Laurent shows up.

The Rubicon, Angela learns in Ancient History, was a river so small that no one today even knows where it was. It was a point of impasse: the boundary no army was supposed to cross lest they declare war on Rome herself.

One symbolic gesture—an advance, an assault. The shape of history changed.

 

There is a world where Jacob and Angela meet in a forest. It’s bright with moonlight, and alive with the sounds of life. Through this light and sound, predators stroll as gods. Jacob and Angela meeting there is a tipping point.

It isn’t the first time they meet but it's the first they remember.

Angela remembers the smells of sap and shampoo, and brown eyes in the dark. Jacob remembers a purple jacket and a grating crunch of bone.

Maybe it’s something in the air. Maybe it’s the phase of the moon. But in that world, war is declared in a clearing and the wreckage sprawls across decades. History takes on the shape of man _and_ wolf, both with brown eyes. Horrible things happen to decent people and decent people do horrible things. Nobody finds the courage to say _I’m sorry_.

Impasse. Rubicon.

(In that world Angela fails History because when she sleeps, she sees Rome burning.)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

In _this_ world, when a predator turns on Angela, she lifts her can and bear-maces it.

In _this_ world Angela and Jacob meet for the first time on a beach surrounded by other kids from the Rez and from Forks. They gather firewood, and talk. They talk about photography, siblings, and twins—wild things with weird languages and exclusive clubs. (Angela's, Jacob's; younger, older; male, female.) They talk about Jacob’s sister Rebecca, and her portfolio of surf photography and marine macros. When the others come back from their hike to La Push, the fire still burns and when Jacob produces a bag of gummy candy from his jacket pocket, he offers it to Angela after Bella refuses. On the drive home the rain closes in and Angela, tracking clouds across the horizon, imagines crashing waves. When she gets home she looks up Rebecca Finau.

In this world, Eric convinces Angela that wildlife photography is her niche, and Angela diffuses a can of bear mace into the eyes of a vampire who tries to eat her on the mountain.

A wolf still comes to the rescue. The vampire still flees. But in _this_ world when a wild thing turns to Angela, she lifts the can a second time and Jacob falls back on his rear, human and screaming. (Forty miles away, Sam starts running.)

Angela has brothers; she’s seen naked boys before. But she’s never seen a naked boy appear from the skin of a wolf, less one who fended off a monster, and she thinks—

The boy, writhing and blinking with eyes streaming and red, spits a curse in Quileute.

She thinks she should be afraid.

Instead she reaches for her jacket. Sam, arriving half an hour later, is twenty minutes too late.

Before that, Angela douses the boy’s face with her water bottle. (‘Irrigate’ the First Aid instructor said.) It takes some time for the snot and tears to subside enough to speak to him. Twice he tries to run. This is before the snot and tears subside; twice he concusses himself on tree trunks.

Angela picks up her jacket where it fell and moves through the shadow of the trees to his side again. “You’ll need an icepack,” she says.

She can’t say what she’s thinking: _What was that? What did you do?_

_What are you?_

Not a twin, but still a wild thing. Swollen face, red eyes. (Brown eyes.) She resettles her jacket around his shoulders. It’s small on him--more a cape than clothing. She adjusts a sleeve to cup his shoulder more comfortably. “And you should go to the clinic.”

He protests. He’ll be fine, he has to go—

He’s slurring; his head is bleeding, gritted with bark; when he stands, he doesn’t. And if he goes, she will never see him again.

“My house is closer,” she says.

He mumbles about healing fast and swearing to secrecy, and Angela doesn’t disbelieve him but he’s got mud and torn greenery smeared up his side, and his eyes – barely open and still so swollen he can surely barely see – are unfocused. She crouches at his side. In the half-shadow of trees, she finally recognises him. Maybe it shows in her eyes. This time when he looks up at her through bleary eyes, they seem to widen. He sways but there’s a stillness to his face that makes her nervous.

“You,” he says. “I almost…” He tilts sideways but, when she reaches out to steady him, avoids her hand. “No. I--”

He doesn’t finish. Vomits, and doesn’t finish. Angela grimaces but doesn’t pull away. His muscles twitch under her jacket as she rubs his back. He lets his head hang. He is, though she doesn’t know it, stunned into pliability by the sudden weight of _almost_.

When she draws him to his feet, he doesn’t fight her.

She almost died; he almost ran; they almost—

She thinks she should be afraid. Instead, she puts an arm around his ribs to hold him upright and leads him, blind, out of the forest.

A symbolic gesture. (This is not the Rubicon.)

This is the world where Angela shoos a little brother out of the kitchen with a glass of milk and fetches a bucket when the boy from the Rez retches. Whatever’s left in him, he keeps it down, but Angela imagines a stomach full of tiny birds – feathers and beaks and bones – and presses the icepack back onto to his puffy eye. His name is Jacob. His sisters are Rachael and Rebecca.

She expects he’ll vanish in the time it takes her to go upstairs and check her brothers are quietly doing their homework. (They aren’t, but Isaac’s asleep and Joshua’s put his headphones back on. He pulled a face in the kitchen that said he would tell Mom that Angela brought home a naked Indian, but he doesn’t stir.)

Jacob’s still sitting at the table when she gets back, bucket between his bare feet. He watches her push the kitchen door closed without speaking. Angela rests her back against the counter, making no move to open the bottle of iodine she retrieved from the bathroom cabinet or to approach him. (She should be afraid—)

He’s too big for Isaac and Joshua’s clothing; there was a pair of sweatpants from the church donations in the laundry. They stretch obscenely over Jacob’s solid thighs. She could have sworn he was sixteen, but he doesn’t look it. The secondhand cardigan is likewise too small.

His manner has changed in the time it took to go upstairs and return: less hangdog, more wary ( _cerrado como culo de muñeca_ , her mother would say), but he’s still here. Maybe it’s because he can’t stand on his own yet. His posture’s firming up, though.

The distance between them seems to stretch to the horizon like the sea and then snaps back. Not so impassable.

Angela puts a foot into the water. “What are you?”

“It’s a secret.” _Seegret_. Sill slurred but less so than in the clearing. (A push back.)

It makes her uncomfortable to press, but she does. “ _No dá_ ,” she says, tasting her mother’s retort on her tongue. “I know what I saw.”

His one-eyed stare is insolent. “Do you.”

“The same thing I saw the other day.” She taps a finger on the iodine cap. “A wolf. And a… _something_ that wanted to eat me.”

The ugly gash on his forehead healed before they made it to the back porch; bits of bark cling to the blood congealed in his eyebrow.

“A human who healed in minutes,” she says. (Externally. His visible eye is unfocused, and he rocks in the chair.)

“I have a strong constitution,” he says.

“You headbutted a tree.”

“ ’s a very strong constitution.”

Impasse.

Jacob moves the icepack to the other eye; Angela looks away. He isn’t lying. Almost, but not quite; he’s treading the edge, nudging pebbles into the water. Refusing to cross. Angela has some experience with that.

His bare feet have left muddy smears on the linoleum. She can still smell the mace from where she stands. If his senses are heightened, she supposes, he must be burning his own nostrils if they aren’t too clogged to smell.

If he won’t cross, she will. “You were a wolf,” she says.

“Sure it w’s me th't hit my head?” (His head tilts off-centre.)

“You saved my life.”

“You maced me.” ( _Magged._ But an inch less of swelling.)

“I maced a wolf.”

He blinks so slowly she worries he’s going to keel over off the chair. Buried under the blood and bark and bits of fern are surprise, pride, and… fear. She has experience with that too.

“I’m not,” he says, “a wolf.” There’s less blood in his eye than a minute ago.

Upstairs, the squeak of a window opening says Joshua is still awake. A flashing red light beside the wall-mounted phone says their father’s run late on home communions. Their mother’s in Seattle seeing a neurologist.

Angela knows about boundaries; Angela knows about fear. Angela knows about needing to look strong and healing up quick so no one sees you bleed, and she knows what it looks like when ‘quick’ isn’t enough.

“I’d appreciate," she says, "if you didn’t lie to me anymore.”

This is not an impasse. This is the Rubicon, and it is not Jacob’s place to declare war on reality. He retreats.

The icepack hits the table with a dull _splat_ and he toes the bucket from between his legs. “I gotta go. People will be looking.” He surges up.

Angela catches his head before it bounces on the floor. She folds herself onto her knees beside him where he fell, and carefully rearranges his shoulders onto them to prop him up.

“I can’t tell you,” he says from the floor. He's pale around the eyes and mouth again under the red from swelling; his tone is almost begging. “Literally.” His eyes roll.

“ _Más vale saber que hablar_. I saw.” She pulls the bucket over just in time.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

In this world, Angela drives a concussed teenager to the ER and they’re very surprised when she pulls up with an apparently healthy one. Driving him back to La Push is non-negotiable. So, apparently, is a talk with his father and Harry Clearwater when she gets there.

 _It’s not my secret_ , Jacob had said from the passenger seat, miserable in the reflected glow of the headlights. _I couldn’t say it even if I wanted to._

She’d looked sidelong to see him half-buried in the woolly lapels of the cardigan _. Do you?_

There is a war, Billy says, unlike any she’s heard of. She was never supposed to be involved and there will – in the immediate future – be a number of hard decisions to be made. But now she _is_ involved and there's no taking that back.

Sam arrives at the Black house not long after she and Jacob do; he emerges from Jacob's room wearing an ill-fitting a pair of cargoes Angela will later learn he stole from Jacob. (Nobody, as yet, has the idea to carry pants with them.) He has a lot to say too. Or Angela supposes he did; he puffed up like he was getting ready for a spiel before Harry raised a hand to him, and Sam deflated. Glaring at Jacob, he ducks outside and doesn't come back.

Jacob says they've crossed the Danube, but Angela doesn’t think that’s what he means. Halfheartedly she makes a history joke Ben told her once but Jacob only stares at her uncomprehending. Wolf, he says. Not scholar. If she wants that history shit, she should talk to Embry. There's a rumble from the shadows around the house that Angela doesn't like to think about. Jacob ignores it.

He suggests, from the threshold of the front door before she leaves, that she confiscate her brothers’ weed if she doesn’t think their preacher father would approve.

Angela gapes before grasping the significance: negotiations, not war. With deliberate effort she closes her mouth and gives him a thin smile. “I’ll tell you some other time why he’s into it at all.”

Jacob's fingers drum on the doorframe like he wants to launch himself out into the night again. “I’m free Sunday night?”

“I’m not—but,” she says hurriedly when Jacob winces, “I guess you’ll need to bring those back sometime.” She gestures to his clothes.

He touches the cardigan where it pulls up a full two inches above the waistband of the sweatpants. “I don’t know, I might keep them. I hear wool is in this season.”

Angela laughs and forgets, for a moment, that she’s talking to a shapeshifter who bled on her tank top and healed before they reached her kitchen. The shape of history changes again, but this time it doesn’t break her in the process.

“The colour suits you,” she agrees.


End file.
